Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  It would be a great relief for him, considering what he called the “comical absurdity” of his situation. Absurd mainly because of what had happened since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the abandonment of communism by the North’s two chosen neutral nations, Poland and Czechoslovakia (and the division of the latter into two brand-new and entirely capitalist countries). North Korea had responded to the apostates by kicking their observers out of the country, leaving only the Swiss and the Swedes to maintain the monitoring. Except that the Poles kept on trying to send at least one delegate to maintain the fiction that the commission still existed, or three-quarters of it anyway. North Korea, which has made denunciation into a cottage industry, still denounces this near-beer body as something “forgotten in history” that is now no more than “a servant of America.”

  Nonetheless, each Tuesday the countries’ representatives meet in formal session—about thirty-five hundred meetings have taken place since the cease-fire in 1953—and discuss and take notes of all the various alleged breaches of the cease-fire and other such matters (tunnel diggings heard, snips in the barbed wire noticed), and write a report. They place these written reports in a mailbox marked KPA, for Korean People’s Army. But since 1995 no North Korean has ever picked up the mail, and so every six months an official from the commission empties the overflowing mailbox and puts all the reports into a file cabinet, just in case Pyongyang ever demands to see them.

  As it happens, the door of the commission’s hut opens directly into North Korean territory, and for a while the Swiss general would unlock it and wave the latest report at the soldiers a few yards away. They turned their backs and ignored him, never came to collect the document, and later complained that the waving constituted an offensive gesture. So with a sigh of frustration the general stopped opening the door, not wanting to provoke or seem impolite, and maybe see for his pains the business end of a Korean-made AK-47.

  So, yes, he’d very much like to entertain our party. How many guests?

  A date was set, and at an appointed hour, forty distinguished men and women from the advertising world—the magazine I was writing for was eager to impress and show gratitude to those who placed advertisements on its pages each month—duly arrived at a U.S. Army base in central Seoul. They were told what to expect, told how to behave—no pointing at North Korean soldiers, no sudden movements, no loud remarks—and were kitted out with flak jackets and steel helmets “just in case.” They were then herded onto two large Chinook helicopters, which rose and then chugged for a half hour up over the mountains and paddy fields north of the city to a river and a ruined bridge, and then settled down on a grassy sports fields at the American forward operating base. A long line of Swiss vehicles was waiting for them, the general in the lead car with pennants, insignia, and the paraphernalia thought likely to appeal to his visitors. The entourage set off through the great fence gates and up to the peaceful-looking wooded grove set down in the very middle of it all.

  For the next three hours we sat at a dining table eating rösti and raclette and chocolate fondue. Out one set of windows we could glimpse in the distance American soldiers drilling, cleaning their weapons, changing duties, jogging. Through the other windows, those looking out over the cold mountain to the north, we could see North Korean artillery pieces and armored vehicles and the barracks of scores of soldiers performing precisely the same tasks as the Americans, from whom they were separated by two mighty fences and two enormous minefields and four kilometers of grassland, with their populations of wild deer and bears and goatlike Amur gorals.

  What we all remembered most, I suspect, was the constant querulous voice on the North Korean loudspeakers, repeating in a soaring monotone the words and wisdom of Kim Il Sung, who had chosen first to rule this benighted country and whose generations of offspring have ruled it, dangerously and wickedly, ever since.

  Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III, who back in the summer of 1945 first drew the pencil line that marks the true epicenter of all this, the line that ran down the center of the Swiss general’s Panmunjom dining table, came to know something of the DMZ’s dangers when he welcomed Captain Bucher and the Pueblo’s crew back across the Bridge of No Return in 1968. This third-generation military man, educated at West Point and Oxford, is now long dead, interred at Arlington National Cemetery. He would without doubt be astonished to see how North Korea has endured, and has so case-hardened and strengthened itself in the years since. Quite unwittingly, the good colonel left the world a powerful legacy—one that to this day, seven decades on, remains memorable, malevolent, unpredictable, dangerous, and a terrible, terrible nuisance.

  1 George Orwell would be the first to introduce the term cold war, in an essay in the magazine Tribune, eight weeks later.

  2 In fact, the Pueblo encountered a near-crippling storm on her first day at sea and, half blind, almost collided with a reef; she had to put in to a second U.S. base in Japan, Sasebo, for two days of repairs.

  3 The plants were taken away as soon as the picture sessions were over; any left were urinated on by the prisoners, in an effort to make them look sickly for any future photo opportunities.

  4 The vessel remains in North Korean hands, currently anchored in the Botong River in central Pyongyang and freshly repainted as a tourist attraction. From time to time there are vague hints that the ship might be sent back to the United States, in exchange for some unspecified high-level political or economic concession. Meanwhile, she is on the active roll of commissioned U.S. Navy vessels, and still sporting the initials USS to indicate her exalted status.

  5 Nonetheless, the authority of the devastating 2014 report of the UN Commission of Inquiry into the alleged barbarities of the regime was somewhat challenged a year later when a key witness, Shin Dong Hyuk, admitted to some fabrications in his testimony. The commission chairman stood by the central message of the report, however, and insisted that the regime be held criminally accountable for its excesses.

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  Chapter 5

  FAREWELL, ALL MY FRIENDS AND FOES

  The enemy has overrun us. We are blowing up everything. Vive la France!

  —FRENCH RADIO OPERATOR’S FINAL WORDS, MAY 7, 1954, BATTLE OF DIEN BIEN PHU, INDOCHINA

  I have relinquished the administration of this government. God Save the Queen.

  —HONG KONG GOVERNOR CHRIS PATTEN, FINAL TELEGRAM TO LONDON, MIDNIGHT, JUNE 30, 1997

  She was the loveliest ocean liner the world had ever seen—eighty-three thousand tons of Clyde-built elegance and pride and craftsmanship, a ship of longing and allure and fine cuisine, of passions promised over her moonlit taffrail, of romances hatched in the sway of her grand saloons. But just after noon on a winter’s Monday in Hong Kong, half the world away from her Scottish birthplace, the burning and twisted wreck of this mighty vessel capsized onto her starboard side and slumped down heavily into the shallow, greasy waters of the harbor, never to rise again. The Royal Mail ship Queen Elizabeth, the younger of the pair of great and graceful sister ships that had for decades dominated the grand luxe transatlantic run, had come to her most wretched and unseemly end.

  Unseemly endings are everywhere in this part of the modern Pacific’s story. So far as the great old ship is concerned, the British firm that built her, John Brown of Clydebank, vanished in financial ignominy. In 1986 the British firm that operated her, Cunard, was reduced to a mere subsidiary of another giant, and now it possesses only three ships, compared with its fleet of sixteen back when the Queens were sailing. And Hong Kong, the British colony where the liner sank, was wrested from London’s hands in 1997 and is now an increasingly Chinese part of China.

  Endings of varying degrees of seemliness extend through the Pacific far beyond the waters of Hong Kong Harbor. Since the sixteenth century and the first crossings of the ocean by exploring outsiders, it has provided foreigners (Europeans, mainly) with an immense imperial playground, with territories for all sides to take, either for wholesal
e exploitation or for the simple amassment of regional power. The Portuguese came first; and then, in quick succession, the Pacific’s great coastal states and its long drifts of islands were snatched up by the Dutch, the Spanish, the British, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Americans, the New Zealanders, and even the Norwegians, all in three centuries of uncontrolled imperial greed.

  Yet so many glorious beginnings were inevitably followed by as many inglorious endings—with the result that all these various powers have retreated from the ocean, leaving the Pacific now almost entirely to its own devices, to be run by its own people.

  The graceful Cunarder RMS Queen Elizabeth, shown in her glamorous heyday and at her sad sabotaged demise in Hong Kong, had a thirty-three-year life, which marked the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.* [Associated Press; Louis Gardella.]

  The foreigners’ first withdrawals from the ocean began, effectively, in the mid-1950s, when France came to accept the reality that its once great Southeast Asian peninsular landholding “Indochine” was no more, and had to be returned. For the next forty years, farewell ceremonies seemed to be held almost monthly, with alien flags lowered and swansdown plumes, helmets, and swords being loaded into cabin trunks and sent home to London, Lisbon, Paris, The Hague, and Washington, from islands and outposts dotted in and around the gigantic blue space of sea. Hong Kong was the last of the outsiders’ grand territories to be handed back—it was retroceded—and this was done with appropriately grand ceremony, half a century after the French pulled down their tricolor in Hanoi.

  The sinking of the Queen Elizabeth, which took place twenty-five years earlier, more or less halfway between the return of Hanoi and that of Hong Kong, might well serve as a symbol for the frailty of empire. It was a reminder of the temporary nature, the sinkability, of all the foreign majesty wielded in this great expanse of sea. That the sinking occurred to a Western-made sea machine, and under circumstances that were peculiarly and bewilderingly Pacific in their nature, helped make the symbolism of the event all the more potent.

  The Cunard Line had first sold off its two Queen liners in 1967. The great ships had operated across the North Atlantic ever since the end of World War II, and both had at first been filled to the gunwales with more than two thousand paying passengers each week. But it was a creature of the Pacific that proved their nemesis: the made-in-Seattle four-engine passenger jetliner the Boeing 707.

  Starting in the late 1950s, when three airlines began using these jets to run daily ferry service between London’s Heathrow Airport and Idlewild in New York City, all of a sudden crossing by ship seemed quaint and inefficient. Despite Cunard’s slogan suggesting that “getting there is half the fun,” the paying public decided that getting there and back in half the time was much more sensible. So, in their thousands, they abandoned the ships, leaving them embarrassingly empty, light in the water.

  “Space is usually available on all departures,” read a dismayed internal note to Cunard directors in 1965. The combination of vacant staterooms and low-budget passengers steadily reduced Cunard’s profits to the thinness of the cucumbers in the Britannia lounge’s afternoon tea sandwiches. And though the firm added to the Queen Elizabeth a three-million-dollar outdoor swimming pool, a Lido Deck, and other touches that it thought holidaymakers might like, and then packed the liner off to try wintertime cruises in the Bahamas,1 the figures continued to slide. In the end, the unsentimental clicking of the back office abacuses sounded the death knell. The Queen Mary was sold first, in August 1967, and on Halloween she sailed off by way of Cape Horn to the Pacific to be, as she remains today, a cemented-in-place hotel and museum on the Long Beach seafront, a successful and well-liked international seamark now remade as a successful and well-liked local landmark.

  The Queen Elizabeth’s fate was to be very much more complicated, very much less dignified, and ultimately, a terribly sorry one. The moment that Cunard put the liner on the block, there came a buzz of intense interest—but a buzz that quickly faded. The firm heard about vaguely suitable offers from companies in Brazil and Japan, but these never materialized, and as many as a hundred others were haughtily dismissed. Eventually a group of American investors in Philadelphia made a real offer; their plan was to moor her in a swamp on the Delaware River and run her as a hotel, similar to the Mary on the far side of the country. But they never checked to see if she would fit in the river (she wouldn’t), or how customers would get to her (a brand-new highway would have to be built).

  Yet, for inexplicable reasons, the Cunard chiefs stuck with these investors, and a deal was made for the liner to become a hotel not in a Chesapeake Bay swamp, but by a nicely tropical beach in Florida. After a series of formal farewells—one a banquet attended by the Queen Mother, the very Elizabeth who had launched the ship thirty years before—the Queen Elizabeth left Southampton at the end of November 1968 for what many hoped was some kind of dignified future.

  It was not to be. She scraped into the port with inches to spare beneath her keel and promptly had the word Queen erased from her name with welding torches. Soon after, she was declared a fire hazard and then began decaying in the damp Florida heat. Meanwhile, among her buyers and their friends, people involved were shot, whacked Mafia style; others went to prison on racketeering charges; some declared bankruptcy; others appeared in long-drawn-out American court battles in which hapless and bewildered Cunard executives from London were brought across to testify.

  When two of the original buyers were jailed, Cunard put the forlorn ship up for sale again—and in September 1970 a Shanghai-born shipowner, Tung Chao Yung, bid three million dollars for her at auction. He would take her to Hong Kong, he said, where he would restore her to her former glory, establish her as a floating center of learning and intellectual discourse, and rename her Seawise University. Eight hundred first-class passengers and eight hundred students would sail with her. “She will be more beautiful than ever,” Tung promised.

  It first took almost one million dollars to make the ship safe enough to take to the seas, and even then the journey to Hong Kong was something of an ordeal. Her boilers broke down. She spent hours adrift, powerless, off Cuba. For days, there was no running water aboard, and welders had to affix three-seater toilets to the outside of the ship’s boat deck, where passengers could go to perform their natural functions, using gravity and the sea instead of the flush and the pipe. She then had to be towed to Aruba, where she spent three months having her engines repaired. She eventually arrived in Singapore, and Royal Air Force jets flew over to salute her as she was tugged to her berth. Two weeks later, in July 1971, she finally arrived in Hong Kong—though she arrived a day early, and had to sail back and forth, south of the colony, like an actress with stage fright waiting for her curtain call. It had taken her five expensive months to perform a journey that a cargo vessel would have done in six weeks. C. Y. Tung was twelve million dollars in the hole already.

  Upon her entering British colonial waters, a fireboat performed a water storm of welcome—a prescient gesture, considering what would then unfold. For, as she anchored off Tsing Yi Island, and as her first refitting got under way (new paint, new cabins, new boilers), there came ominous warnings, particularly of that most feared enemy of all deep ocean ships: an outbreak of fire.

  Ship fires are terrifically dangerous—with all that fuel aboard, with hundreds of tons of combustible materials, with scores of passengers and crew. They are also very hard to fight—foul weather and great distance can hinder any firefighting efforts from outside, and if water is pumped onto the blaze, it may well endanger the vessel’s buoyancy. After “the indiscriminate use of large quantities of water,” reads one of the standard manuals on the subject, “the ship may be lost as a result of instability, and not because of the fire.”

  Hong Kong government officials had been openmouthed with dismay at the lack of fire precautions they discovered when they had toured the great ship. They found sprinklers out of order, an el
ectrical system as frayed as the carpets, fire hoses not working, main pipes cracked and blocked, watertight doors left open, and no fire crews with any idea of how to fight a blaze. Twenty-one recommendations for improvements were swiftly made: if the Queen was left as she was, said the government, she “presents an extremely dangerous fire and life risk.” Mr. Tung said he would do all that was asked.

  But his problem turned out to be political, a classic Pacific collision between ideological systems that were both Asian and American, even between races. For, many years before, Tung had committed what to some appeared a heresy: he had turned his back on Communist China. Like so many Hong Kongers of his generation, he had fled by way of Taiwan to the British colony, and there had run an empire of profit, indulgence, and entrepreneurialism. He had lived a life that was entirely counter to the attitudes and aspiration of the Communists and, more important, because of his unique situation, of the Communist agents who were operating among the working millions in Hong Kong.

  For, in the early 1970s, the colony was an ideological tinderbox. In China the Cultural Revolution may have been starting to wane, but the Red Guards were still ferocious and active, and the turmoil that had convulsed the mainland since 1966 frequently seeped southward, into the British colony, and erupted in demonstrations and riots that had sorely tested the local police and militia.

  Strikes and slowdowns were a constant threat, and though by the early 1970s the main sources of disruption had been largely tamped down, there were agitators and troublemakers aplenty still active. Many were active in the labor unions, and most especially of all, there were many among the workers who came each day to hammer and chip, weld and paint, on Mr. Tung’s great white whale of—as they liked to see her—a onetime British imperialist, white man’s ship.